I’ve achieved a great number of great things in my time as a Zero, some world changing, others on a smaller scale. You’ll remember, no doubt, that time I turned off a light for an hour and also, like I say, the other stuff that was on a smaller scale.

This week has seen one of the bigger bits of personal doing: I’ve left my job. Yes yes. I’ve left behind the world of self-made stress and pressures and targets, shed my pin striped suit and bowler hat, raced my last rat, filoed my last fax and bid farewell to the back-biting, office politicking and ruthless profiteering that is a day’s work in one of the world’s largest multinational… um… charities.

I’m heading back to uni to retrain as a social worker. It’s one of the meddlingest vocations around, one where I could help ex offenders straighten out and pre-offenders live right, where I could help substance abusers take it down a notch, help disableds get about a bit, and get a kicking from the tabloids for taking your children into care when you’ve done nothing to them or not taking them into care until after you’ve battered them to death. That’s some damn good do-gooding.

You can quit your own job and move to a more noble career, via two years of self-inflicted poverty, by emailing your boss here and telling them what you’d like to do with their genitals and a couple of Fruit Corners. In the meantime I’m off for a few weeks to see what they’re up to in Nepal and India.

The last Charity of the Month was inspired by Persepolis, a cracking film about a girl growing up under a fundamentalist regime in Tehran. This month I’ve seen The Exorcist, Inception, Local Hero and Sullivan’s Travels. Naturally I’m on the lookout for a charity supporting crucifix-shagging children trapped in a dream within a dream in a small Scottish town on the outskirts of 1940s Hollywood. Unfortunately there are dozens to choose from and the task of narrowing them down has become so arduous I’ve turned my attention to the BP thing and gone for Greenpeace instead.

Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig that beat Garry Kasparov, incriminated Nixon and sucked off the 1970s has leaked somewhere between 94-184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. It’s an environmental disaster of epic proportions, the kind of thing Dick Cheney might think about to get his bonk on.

I’m not donating to the clean up because that’s BP’s responsibility but it put me in mind of a certain charity that raises awareness of environmental outrages large and small, day in, day out, a charity that has campaigned for decades to protect Mother Earth, a charity that warns us of our folly and guides us to better things. The Charity of the Month this month is Greenpeace.

Remind me to take out the mention of Greenpeace in the first paragraph or it’ll render that tension building pointless.

Greenpeace has been knocking about since the early 1970s, publicly frowning about whaling, seal hunts, toxic waste, acid rain and CFCs. That most of those issues now sound as dated as an angora space hopper is down to them and others banging on until we did something about them. My donation could help maintain their hippy boat of annoyance, The Rainbow Warrior, or fund their campaigns against illegal logging, over-fishing, dumping of nuclear waste, toxic chemicals and such and such. You can donate here.

All of which brings us to the closing paragraph where usually I’d throw in a punchy gag or a sarky kicker or a bit of smut but given no one is remotely interested in this deeply unpopular recurring feature I’ll go and eat worms while you and the rest of the world go do something better with your time. Nuts to the lot of you.

Al Gore is a loving but vengeful overlord. He has given unto us his message of love and doom and left us with the task of saving the world. He tries to remember our weaknesses and have patience but he is a wrathful and angry Gore and is not above giving us a bit of a kicking.

The response to the Al Gore Says stickers was generally quite positive but there is still the odd bit of resistance, still the odd person printing single sided or binning milk bottles. They shall meet His wrath. But Gore has not pre-destined us to meet His anger but to obtain salvation through slapping a few more stickers around the place. As his messenger on earth I got busy.

Bish: I put Amorous Al on a pile of scribble pads made from unwanted single-sided print outs.

Bash: I put Frustrated Al on a milk bottle and stuck the bottle to the bin so no one could ignore His message.

Bosh: I put Nuclear Al on another bin lid to strike fear into the hearts of heathens and make binners repent.

People, if this second round doesn’t do it we’re looking at famine, flood and disaster so massive it’ll make that shit in Sodom and Gomorrah look like a work of fiction cooked up by a team of homophobic nutcases.

Every summer Mrs Zero and I rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear. This year we’re venturing further afield, taking in Nepal and India. It could be a chance to get away from it all, to leave behind the woes of life with all its agonies, politics, injustices and hand wringing. But not if I have anything to do with it.

Even on their holidays humans commit horrific fouls against each other. According to Tourism Concern we risk global warming from plane emissions, deforestation from holiday parks and the seas getting a kicking from water sports. We risk new complexes displacing indigenous people, long showers bringing water poverty and complete arseholes exploiting women and children caught in the sex trade. Spend too long thinking about it you’ll believe tourism’s towards the top of the Evilometer, placed somewhere between the holocaust and Bill O’Reilly’s narrow mind.

The obvious solution is to cancel the trip and spend our holiday in the cupboard under the stairs flogging ourselves for even thinking about inflicting these horrors on an unsuspecting developing world. But there must be a middle ground. There must be a choice we can make. We could spew plane carbon halfway across the world, land on endangered toads, stay in a massive hotel owned by a massive corporation paying its workers a pittance and spend a fortnight raping locals and punching orphans in the face. Or we could fly on the back of Gwaihir the Windlord, stay in a locally owned place to support a local entrepreneur, use water responsibly and not at all when there are shortages, and generally be the upstanding/uptight types we are at home.

So here’s the plan: we will travel overseas on a big fat carbon spewing plane because the world’s an interesting place and I want to see more than the end of my street. Besides, Gwaihir apparently doesn’t do outward flights or we wouldn’t have had to sit through nine hours of Hobbits orienteering their way to Mordor. To make up for it we’ll buy carbon credits on the off chance they make some kind of difference and aren’t just a cheap ethical placebo. We’ve got about five and a half tonnes to account for. Then we’ll rent a room from someone local, eat from locally owned places and respect the water shortages when they hit. Last time I was out there I went four days without a shower and, damn it, I can stink that hard again if it’s in the name of self-righteousness.

That’ll do as a compromise because I aim to minimise the impact I make on the environment, not deny my existence completely and only visit places accessible by donkey or pure thought. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a hanky hat to pack; style doesn’t come without effort.

The trick with this Zeroism lark is to attack the world’s environmental and social stupidities on a number of fronts at the same time. This week I’ve been simultaneously addressing the G8 on their unfair trade practices, happy slapping Robert Mugabe for his anti-homosexual outrages and fannying about in the office to improve our efforts in recycling.

The response to the recycle bins has been quite positive, minus the odd bit of grumbling about people not having bins at their desks any more. The water cooler has been replaced by a mains supply so we’ve saved a load of plastic bottles but some people are still binning things they could recycle and the battle of the plastic cups is far from over. With the help of a right-on colleague I’d removed the plastic cups from the mains water cooler and hidden them in a cupboard but, alas, the first time we had a visitor to the building they were brought back out.

Something has to be done! And who better to do it than former future President and Inconvenient Truther Al Gore?

Bish: I slapped Happy Al sign on the water cooler to remind people of the folly of single use plastic cups.

Bash: I put Angry Al on the bin lid to stop people throwing in their paper, bottles and cans. The recycle bin’s right next to it!

Bosh: I put Learning Difficulties Al on the printer to shame people who still refuse to print double sided.

With the power of Gore and the entire Zero movement combined there’s no telling what we can do. Although the safe bet would be him inspiring millions around the world and me just talking to my brother about the piddly bollocks I get up to.